Saturday, May 11, 2013

World of choices

(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in May 2009)

I
think I’m finally honed this movie watching thing to a state that pleases me.
For years I’ve moaned about how the art of cinema gets crowded out, even for
true believers, by the shrewd, calculating weight of the commercial machine.
I’ve moaned about it, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been that good at resisting
it.

As I
write this, on the weekend of May 2, some 15 new movies just opened in New
York, based on TheNew York Times review section. There is,
categorically, no meaningful aesthetic, intellectual or life-enhancing standard
by which X-Men Origins: Wolverine is
the most significant of those offerings. Of course, by the nature of the
investment it represents, it carries the most urgent commercial imperative, but this ought to mean about as much to film
lovers as a new flavour of frozen juice means to a gourmet chef. And yet, even
serious film writers give Wolverine
pride of place (in, for example, The New
York Times review section). Let’s not fool ourselves this is some
reflection of democracy or cultural temperature. It’s an orchestrated crafting
of the public discourse, and Hollywood’s great at keeping it going.

Spoiled for choice

I
don’t mind it; I just wish I were
better at ignoring it. But I’m getting better. Yes, I saw the previous X-men
movies, although they never meant a thing to me. But no Wolverine - I mean it. After years of seeing three or even four new
movies a week in a hopeless attempt to cover all the bases, I’ve kept it to two
a week, at the most, this year. Further, those one or two are often far from
the “obvious” two to see, if I were writing say for the Toronto Star. So by my weak standards, that’s some sustained
fortitude. And this opens up more time for what really interests me more and
more, which is to revisit and deepen my appreciation of cinema’s huge, gorgeous
past. Of course, except in the most tokenistic of ways, it’s contrary to
Hollywood’s ongoing needs to promote too acute an interest in previous decades,
because if people really tuned into the extent of the decline, they’d just
ignore all the new junk, stay at home and watch well-chosen DVDs.

In an
environment where 10 or 15 new movies get into theaters (maybe not here, but
somewhere), every week, and some multiple of that circulates around the
festival circuit, it seems increasingly hopeless to me even to aim for
capturing the cream of the crop. I mean, what are we supposed to put weight on?
The Oscars? Hardly. A few well-chosen critics with sensibilities seemingly
close to one’s own? It helps narrow things down, but no more than that. And how
do you define the cream of the crop anyway? As I’ve often written here, movies’
lasting impact and stimulation often comes from their flaws (however you define
that!) as from their unexceptional
strengths. To be honest, I miss the old days (not that I was around for them)
when everyone could simply agree to watch Bergman and Fellini; it must have
saved a lot of time, and the payoff sure wasn’t too bad. But now we’re defined
by democratization and fragmentation. Sadly, it means it’s increasingly harder
to have an informed, engaged conversation about any aspect of culture, except
for junk topics like Susan Boyle – no one’s ever seen the same thing. Choice
and self-determination can be lonely things.

Anyway,
that Saturday I went to a movie I’d never even heard of until a few days
previously – Adrift in Tokyo, the
latest example of the downtown AMC’s admirable policy of devoting one or two
screens to obscure foreign films. To be honest, I read the movie was
essentially two characters wandering around Tokyo, and since my wife and I
spent a few days last year doing exactly that, I thought, well, that sounds
good enough. The movie was sweet and engaging, but I wonder if any of us will
ever hear of it again. Then the following day, having no idea how to choose
between such possibilities as Act of God,
Tulpan and The Lemon Tree, I just
threw up my hands and stayed at home. Will this be a trend? I really don’t
know. I’m not even sure what I’m hoping for.

State of Play

I’m
not saying the occasional Hollywood movie doesn’t grab me, on thematic or other
grounds. Star Trek probably will, but
that’s a story for another week. The week before I saw Adrift in Tokyo, I put my money down for State of Play, directed by Kevin McDonald. It’s a two-hour
Americanized adaptation of a six-hour British TV drama; I never saw that, but
many writers detected a loss of complexity and nuance in translation. What’s
left isn’t too shabby though. Russell Crowe (memorably described in The New Yorker as resembling a dumpling
in a wig) is a crack journalist for the fictional Washington Globe, covering a local double murder; meanwhile the
paper’s online political blogger, played by Rachel McAdams, stalks the latest
political scandal involving hot young Congressman Ben Affleck, who happens to
be Crowe’s best friend. The two stories turn out to be (a) linked and (b) just
the ribbon on top of a bigger package.

It’s
an old-fashioned creation, focusing on nuts and bolts gruntwork, and faithful
to the continuing primacy of print media. I liked how the suspense highpoint
involves Crowe merely hiding in a parking garage from a pursuing assassin,
scared out of his wits; no Cage-like transformations of ordinary Joe into
Superman. The film looks handsome enough, but could have used the greater
stylization of someone like Michael Mann, or in particular of Alan Pakula, who
owned the franchise on paranoia in the 1970’s (All the President’s Men, The Parallax View). There’s an evil
corporation in the mix, but it’s an awfully dull creation: maybe that’s part of
the point though, the banal face of high-stakes mendacity now. Likewise, the
stream of flavourful secondary characters could profitably have been made a
little spicier. Crowe himself though is very nuanced and enjoyable (and not at
all like anything made from batter, or pastry, or whatever it is).

Getting Worse

Recent
events may have overtaken the film a little bit. Assassins and bribery and
political influence peddling seem positively quaint compared to, you know, almost
bankrupting the world as we know it. And sadly the plight of the newspapers is
currently even worse than the film depicts (in the course of the movie,
McAdams’ character becomes something of a convert to the old ways, but in the
real world she’d surely be more of a new-media zealot than that). Still, at the
end it subtly tempers any sense of triumph; nowadays the spotlight of
achievement just makes you aware of how much darker everything else is getting
to be. Much as I enjoyed it, I wondered if in some subliminal way the essential
message wasn’t that it’s safer to stay at home.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).